


High Content

by grossferatu



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Collars, F/F, Murder, Non-Sexual Kink, Non-Sexual Submission, The Hunt, The Magnus Archives Rare Pairs 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2020-01-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:41:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22352773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grossferatu/pseuds/grossferatu
Summary: Daisy needs a guiding hand.(AU where Daisy is Gertrude's attack dog.)
Relationships: Gertrude Robinson & Alice "Daisy" Tonner
Comments: 12
Kudos: 44
Collections: The Magnus Archives Rare Pairs 2020





	High Content

**Author's Note:**

  * For [schneefink](https://archiveofourown.org/users/schneefink/gifts).



The thing at her feet used to be human but Daisy doesn’t think about that. She’s still coming down, white knuckles clenching her baton, and she leans herself against a tree to breathe. She always expect more of a come-down, more of a crash from the pure adrenaline high of the hunt; instead she feels fuller than she ever does after a meal. 

She has to turn away to make sure she doesn’t think about  _ meat _ . 

“I cannot fault your effectiveness.” The voice addressing her is not one of the other sectioned, come to check up on her, or even another monster to hunt.

Daisy smells a faint wisp of the Watcher and turns around, the change from tired and resting to alert and ready to strike too natural, too immediate for her to really notice it. She does not deal with followers of that god very much--they tend not to fall in the way of the Hunt, even if they are as frightened creatures scuttling in the dark. 

“What do you want?” 

The words leave her mouth before she can fully process what she’s looking at. When she does, she barks a laugh and takes a step back. An old woman. She shouldn’t be something Daisy is afraid of, except she does not smell at all like  _ prey _ . She smells like dust and books and the exposed rock of a mountain under the gaze of a disinterested god. 

The woman shrugs carefully and Daisy is reminded of a librarian or schoolteacher, not by her clothes but how she does her hair, grey strands tucked out of the way, and how she holds herself, confident and knowing, a self-aware authority. Her clothes are loose and practical, and she carries a bag that smells familiar. 

“What’s all that for?” Daisy asks. She doesn’t like explosives; they leave too much of a trace, and she always feels like she’s gone fishing with dynamite. It’s cheating. 

The woman jerks her head towards the corpse. “That. He was trying to make a meat puppet.” She steps past Daisy, not noticing or caring about her baton, her stance, the way she bares her teeth. “I see he didn’t succeed.”

“We heard something strange was happening in these woods. I was sent to deal with it.”

The smile Daisy gets is understanding. “Of course,” she says. She narrows her eyes at Daisy. “You’re more effective than some of your colleagues. This was efficient. Do you hunt people?”

That puts Daisy’s hackles up. “No,” she says. “These things aren’t people.” She doesn’t like to think about those kinds of questions. They quiet the singing in her blood. 

This smile is predatory. “Excellent. Help me?” She readjusts the strap of her bag. She wears her age badly, and Daisy now recognizes that uneven aging of those touched deeply by a god. There is a hunter, a sectioned officer, who is older than the paperwork that makes him official. 

Daisy stares at her. “What?” She takes a step back again, this time in the other direction. She doesn’t want to be near this woman, not when she is definitely holding a back full of explosives she apparently intended to toss at the meat man Daisy has just torn apart with her fingers (claws) and mouth (fangs).

“I am sympathetic to the Hunt. You don’t want to rule the world. You just want to play in it. There are more monsters than you Sectioned officers ever see. Help me fight them.” It’s a speech. Daisy can almost hear the music swelling as she starts speaking, but she doesn’t continue. “I’m Gertrude. You are Alice Tonner. Help me.” Daisy doesn’t have to wonder how she knows that name. She can almost see the eyes blinking in and out of existence, though she has a feeling that Gertrude would not be happy with Daisy if she brought it up. 

“Daisy.” She manages to stumble over her own name. “Please.” This woman has her off balance. She is on a vivisection table, or flayed alive so that all her intriguing, animal parts can be catalogued and understood. 

“Ah,” Gertrude says. “Of course.” 

“How do you know I’ll say yes?” Daisy asks, knowing that’s the kind of question a person asks before agreeing to an unwanted task. 

“You’d like a hand on your lead, I think,” Gertrude says. “Wouldn’t you?”

Daisy manages to stop the whine that starts low in her throat, but only barely. “No,” she says, and doesn’t mean it. “You don’t know anything.”

Gertrude takes Daisy’s baton from numb fingers. “My dear,” she says, and Daisy leans into the hand around her throat. “I know almost everything.”

-

Gertrude objects to the collar, finds it crass and a little unsettling. “I am not your dominant,” she says, even as she strokes Daisy’s hair after a hunt. “You are useful to me.” She says this often. It has not been very long at all since Daisy agreed to help her, but already she is caring. 

Daisy smiles at her, teeth sharper than they should be. “You want me to be your dog, don’t you? And dogs need collars to show they’re  _ tame _ .” Gertrude is a good master, even if she denies it. 

This makes Gertrude’s hand stop, and Daisy whines. She’s bigger than Gertrude, but she still winds up sprawled across her lap in the apartment. 

It's too intimate. Gertrude wants to kick her out, always wants to kick her out, but she has a role to play, and she can't deny her satisfaction at carrying it out. 

"All right," Gertrude finally says. She leaves her thumb in the hollow of Daisy's throat. "On one condition."

"Yes?" 

"Quit the police. Stay mine."

Daisy's eyes widen. She stares up at Gertrude, unwilling or unable to react. “I... can’t,” she says. 

Gertrude is not soft. She is bony from undereating and overworking and her elbows stick into Daisy’s stomach sometimes. Daisy likes to lie splayed across her lap, letting herself be petted. Her hands are soft on Daisy’s throat, on her stomach, on her hair. 

“Why not?” Gertrude is smiling. She likes it when it when Daisy pushes back, when they both pretend that there is push and pull. 

“They own me.”

Gertrue laughs. “Oh, Daisy, Daisy,” she whispers, her touch softening even as her voice has an edge of steel. “You haven’t been theirs since you let me touch your throat.” She sighs, readjusting how she sits. She wears her age badly, but she still wears it, and Daisy imagines even someone with a human nose could smell the stiffness in her joints. 

“Okay.” She feels something loosen in her chest. She likes what the police let her do. She loves what Gertrude makes her do. Gertrude knows what she’s doing is right, letting Daisy fearlessly follow that absolute certainty. 

With Gertrude, Daisy does not feel the urge for unneeded cruelty, anymore, and her bone-deep hunger is sated in ways that are still brutal but not quite so random.

“Good,” Gertrude says. She strokes her thumb against Daisy’s throat a final time. “I’ll buy one for you. Would you like a name tag?” The tone of the question is not mocking, but clinical information seeking. 

“Yes,” Daisy says, and feels her cheeks burn red. “Please.”

-

She doesn’t so much resign as stop showing up to work. It’s almost like she’s unpersoning herself, dropping away from her last connection to something like humanity. 

She tells this to Gertrude, annoying the other woman. 

“I’m far more human than any of your fellow sectioned.” She says this as she watches Daisy carefully dismember something that is more doll than human and pile its limbs and dessicated torso onto a grim fire. 

“You encourage me,” Daisy says, simply. She touches the collar around her neck. 

“I pull on your leash when I need to,” Gertrude counters. “You have to remember you are human, more or less,” she says. Her voice is even more intense than it usually is, as though she wants Daisy to pay attention to these words especially. “Even our relationship is something humans do.” 

Daisy takes a step back from the fire to stand by Gertrude. She is shorter, can lean her head on Gertrude’s upper arm and close her eyes. 

“Delude yourself all you wish, Archivist,” Daisy says, using a title Gertrude has unwillingly grown into like a weed through concrete. “I am not so easily alienated from myself.”

Gertrude sighs. “I worry about you,” she says, and Daisy can’t help but smile at that. The sectioned officers don’t  _ worry _ . They guard each other, not like dogs but like a human’s bad approximation of wolves. 

“Don’t,” Daisy says. “You knew what you were doing when you claimed me, and I am glad to be at your side.”

The fire is close to burning itself out. This particular doll-human was not plastic, but cloth and wooden button eyes and feather-stuffing, everything all sewn together with cheery, nerve-colored thread. It burns bright and quickly, without much heat. 

“I took a calculated risk. I am... glad with the result.” Gertrude is not good at tender words. Instead, she is touchier than Daisy might expect if she just saw her on the street, and occasionally says something half-emotionally expressive. This is a strange conversation anyway, humanity always a bizarre topic to consider, even with someone who almost understands. 

“I don’t want to end up like this one,” Gertrude says, quietly. “I know what Elias is trying to make me, and I know I’m getting hungrier.” She’s stricter with herself than she is with Daisy, feeding herself on dusty tape recordings and the odd scrap of trauma she picks up when she really cannot help herself. 

“I can feed you,” Daisy says. She likes the idea more than she expected before she said the words, but now that she’s thinking about it something old and dangerous warms inside her, and she digs her fingers into Gertrude’s side, half-clutching at her. “I can make people afraid, and you can pull it out of them like silk.”

Another difference from the sectioned officers: Daisy never felt tender like this, never felt soft like this. She’s wild in a way those caged animals would never understand--loved, and loving, protecting and protected. 

Gertrude shakes her head. “No,” she says. “I can’t.”

Daisy knows Gertrude well enough now not to be offended. She hums, a soft sound, and pulls away. “Let’s put out this fire,” she says. “I want to go home.”

-

The first time she runs into someone she knew on the force after she ‘leaves,’ that officer is the object of hers and Gertrude’s chase. 

This happens to them, sometimes. The blood-madness grows too much, and the human form so important for effective police work falls away, leaving a human mind’s ideaform of a wild beast in its place. That is the problem with these gods, as Gertrude has explained more than once. They are easily twisted to a human’s own perception of what she needs, and a far-gone hunter’s dreaming of a wolf is much more quickly realized than how the animals truly are. 

(That is how Gertrude tamed Daisy, she knows. She changed how Daisy thinks about herself, no longer a wolf in a captive pack of strangers, but something not only useful, but careful. Daisy is not a wolf. She is a well-trained, high-content wolf-dog, and she pities her former packmates, who are not and never will be well-handled.)

She shoots the poor wolf-man in the head, feeling the thick blood spray her face as the silver bullet (these gods traffic in ideas, Gertrude says, and while Daisy is not sure she has no reason to doubt her, not after all this time) hits him between the eyes. Her ears should be ringing, but the air-breakingly loud sound of the gun does not bother her, for it is merely part of the hunt, same as all other necessary noises. 

He collapses and shrinks back into his police uniform, naked and useless and frightening to look at.

“Are you all right?” Gertrude asks. She wipes the blood off Daisy’s face and kisses her cheek, her lips dry as the bones Daisy dreams of crunching between her teeth. 

“Yes,” Daisy says. “They would have sent another officer, otherwise,” she says. 

She does not feel human anymore, but she feels whole, and walking behind Gertrude that is all she needs to feel soul-deep contentment. 

  
  



End file.
